English and Hindi poetry and prose, published as well as experimental. Book reviews, essays, translations, my views about the world and world literature, religion, politics economics and India. Formerly titled "random thoughts of a chaotic being" (2004-2013).

I was asked to explain how far was I from a distant
cousin in London and from another uncle in Africa.

Her elder sister strained her years as well –
While I offered distances in kilometers, their gaze failed
to see what thousands I spoke of.

For both of them, Delhi, four hundred kilometers away, was a far-off horizon
and they barely knew much counting.

So I asked them to forget about distances, and think time.
I told them of the time difference between nations. The elder one asked,
"Why do the damn watches behave differently?"

Neither the time difference nor the number of miles meant anything.
So I grabbed a stick, and carved nations on the ground,
and pointed out India, America.

My cartography was as useless to them as my talk about how distant
we had become, separated by the education and more.

An unsolved problem of explaining stuff, before a future
professor of Physics – I told myself – try harder!

I asked daadi if she had anything spherical at hand.

Daadi looked around the house, recounting several stories about the balls
brought and lost by her different grandsons, concluded, “Forget it, far
is the other world: why worry about it?”

Then I found an onion, and brought out a flashlight.

"See grandmas," I said. "The Earth is like an onion
and the sun is like this flashlight, only much bigger.”

I took a pen and drew the continents and oceans
and lectured, "The Earth is like an onion,
and it spins like a top, once a day."

The Grandmothers watched the shadow of the onion,
and the rays from a battery powered sun and saw rotation
of earth as the harbinger of fun.

Here Sun is rising in India, while America is sleeping.
Africa must wait for its dawn, and London
once lit, isn't now so.

"O close to death old woman!" said my delighted daadi,
"Earth is like an onion, and rotates. My grandson suggests,
Sun is no God moving east to west on Chariot, as we thought."

The two sisters, with their life's wrinkles on them, are hooked
to my demonstration. Excited to show them more,
I find a grape and call it Chandamaama, the moon uncle.

Aryabhatta, Kepler, Galileo and Copernicus smile.
I was repeating their words, translated into Pahari.

Soon the sisters discovered the eclipses.
The elder one remarked, "Why, the younger widowed one,
the accursed Rahu doesn't swallow the sun during the eclipse, o dear."
Both then praised Gods for incredible things Americans taught me.

I returned to my parent's house, and narrated the story to my mother.
She clapped her hands, and burst out laughing, explained to me,
"O son, by now, the whole village must have seen that onion."

The onion, like the earth, now moves from hand to hand.
My grandmother now carries the torchlight
and she is teaching people how to make night and day.

Friday, April 08, 2011

After your lip was bit, kiss was hiss, your sleep
was a warm body snoring next to you. Your dreams
were the breeze outside bolted windows. Your thoughts
hooted from the banyan trees planted by your ancestors.

Biting your own lip brings luck, said your mother,
but you knew blood tastes like ocean water, your age
was little/ eleven but the gashes in your memory were as large
as in the wartime stories your grandma retrieved for you.

Last week your friend's father came home with Sri Lankan
blood in his veins, on his hands, and in his last evening
you heard him say, the mission was for peace, but the debris
of blown-up huts pricked my chest exactly where they pinned my medals.

The Kashmiri Pandit girl in your class hasn't smiled for six months,
her mother was molested, knifed before her family was exiled.
She confided in you, no Hindu Gods came to save us.
You worry for your mother who fasts and trusts her divinities.

Your father sullenly shakes his head, while college students burn
themselves, opposing increase in caste-based reservation. Schools
are on a forced vacation, the car-sevaks talk of building Ram Temple
in Ayodhya, and your friend's cousins fell to the bullets of Sikh separatists.

A callous cricket ball smashed the window near your desk.
Your neighbor eloped, then returned, then killed herself, or her family
murdered her, but newspapers keep printing color spreads about heroines.
You write verses. Your voice is turning coarser, so is your world-view.

“Albeit world is full of gallant bards, but Ghalib’s style is beyond everyone”
If Mir, Faiz be Keats n Shelley, Ghalib’s at least the Shakespeare of Ghazals.

Umrao Jaan, a geisha, the seductress – dancer - poetess of the first major Urdu Novel,
shuns her reason/Vivek and has affairs with three men, all enchanted with her Ghazals.

Kotha literally means terrace. It also means a house of ill fame. The seductress, a tawaif, was usually trained in classical dance and music, performed a sensual dance (mujra) for money, either on her own terrace (kotha) or at special ceremonies (mehfil). She could take lovers if she wished. Umrao Jaan Ada written by Mirza Ruswa in 1905 was adapted into a critically acclaimed movie titled Umrao Jaan by Muzaffar Ali in 1981.

Vivek is a published poet. He reads & writes in Hindi and English. His poetry and essays in English are published in Poetry, Atlanta Review, The Cortland Review, Kartika
Review, Bateau, Muse India, Reading Hour, etc. He contributes columns and verses to Divya
Himachal (Hindi newspaper in India). Vivek's first collection, "Saga of a Crumpled Piece of
Paper" (63 poems, English, Writers
Workshop, Calcutta) was published in 2009.

Vivek spend his childhood in Himachal Pradesh and undergraduate years in IIT Delhi. He pursued a doctoral degree at Georgia
Tech, Atlanta (2003-2008) and he was a postdoctoral research associate in
Mechanical Engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
Cambridge (MA) (2008-2012). He currently resides in Chicago.